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Printing Natural Knowledge Chapter 3: Printing Natural Knowledge “The purpose of writing may be to persuade the wise and intelligent; or else it may be to persuade everyone in town.” So wrote Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, pro- fessor at the university of Pisa and already the author of an important work on Euclid, to his ex-colleague Marcello Malpighi, just starting out on the faculty at the university of Bologna and about to publish his fundamental work revealing the microstructure of the lungs. Deciding what to publish, and for whom, was no easy matter, still some thirty years after the twin trials of Orazio Morandi and Galileo Galilei. “But if you choose to write to the common citizens of Bo- logna to persuade them about the calumnies made against truth,” Borelli con- tinued, “I conceive that in this case you may use every effort to deride any per- son who peddles a pile of idiocies just to offend virtuous and meritorious people.” 1 Of course, for Borelli, “virtuous and meritorious people” meant per- sons who followed empirical method for the study of nature, exemplified by Galileo; and “truth” meant the truth drawn from the use of that method. “Idio- cies” meant ideas conceived by those whom the Galileians conceived as dogma- tists and mystifiers. Still in the 1660s, whether Galileo’s disciples and their followers would triumph against the dogmatists and mystifiers was by no means clear. The story of their campaign to capture public attention, with all its fits and starts, is far less well known than the content of their ideas. It will occupy us here. The decision to take the campaign for the new science to “the common citi- zens of Bologna,” or Venice, or Florence, or Rome, was not taken lightly. “Learn at Galileo’s expense,” Michelangelo Ricci told Donato Rossetti, Borel- li’s student and then a professor at Pisa, “He ran into so much trouble just be- cause he picked fights.” 2 He would not go so far to suggest, with the literary gadfly Gregorio Leti, that “whoever wishes to look minutely into the effects that an author’s ideas might have on the minds of people would never write a book.” 3 But as Roman correspondent to the discreet Accademia del Cimento in Florence, he well knew how to avoid controversy. And the best way was to ig- nore the revolution in print and work behind the scenes. Enthusiasm about publishing became unconditional only around the 1690s. By that time, a host of new genres and methods had emerged, from natural sci- ence handbills to periodical publications. As the Italian practitioners of the nat- ural sciences began to understand their market, they experimented with new 41 42 Chapter 3 techniques for appealing to it. To be sure, the boundary between those interest- ed in investigating natural phenomena and those who lived off the investiga- tions of others was not particularly distinct. Nor was there a distinct division between those interested in continuing the innovative tradition of Galileo and those interested in following a more traditional line of research. But enough can be said about the emergence of scientific entrepreneurialism in seventeenth- century publishing in this chapter to serve as a background for our discussion of the education market in the next chapter. Diffidence about publishing natural knowledge had many causes, and the confusing behavior of the authorities in charge of monitoring the printing press was certainly a major one. Church officials ignored open expressions by influ- ential French clerics like Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi in favor of the same heliocentric views condemned in the trial of Galileo. Yet they seemed to be just as adamant as in Galileo’s time in opposing the publication of new ideas about science as late as 1663, when they put Descartes’ works on the Index. Then, within four years of the condemnation of Descartes, they permitted open expressions of various versions of the mechanical philosophy plainly in their midst, in the Roman Giornale de’ letterati , run by Francesco Nazari and collab- orators from 1668 (“what would be wrong . if the generation and corruption of things should be caused only by local movements of the atoms and there would be no substantial forms in the world”? 4) Elsewhere in Italy the situation was not much clearer. In Bologna, the local censor provided Malpighi with a perfect pretext for seeking the advantages of an English publisher by objecting to the Protestant addressee of the letter on silkworms (Henry Oldenburg, later changed to the Royal Society) even though he had approved of similar dedica- tions on previous occasions. In Naples, the local Inquisition said nothing about Lucantonio Porzio’s openly Cartesian explanation of matter and motion in Del sorgimento de’ licori (1670) concerning capillary action, in spite of the cries of the Aristotelians, who had enough clout to induce a Cartesian witch hunt later on. 5 Furthermore, anything printed was not only subject to being read, but also to being stolen. Borelli worried about putting the Accademia del Cimento into direct contact with its sister-academy, the French Académie des Sciences. “It seems to me that we ought to be informed about the activities and speculations of that academy,” he noted, “[but] I am hesitant . [since] I cannot be sure that those French gentlemen . [will not] follow the old custom of making foreign- ers the authors [of our discoveries].” 6 Printers all over Europe well knew that intellectual property, however fiercely defended by writers, was not yet a legal category. Others believed the potential audience for natural knowledge in Italy was too small. To secure credit for his discoveries, Malpighi was content to keep his friend and patron Cardinal Scipione Borghese up to date on all his activities at the University of Bologna; but instead of publishing his letter on silkworms in Italy, he published it in London, and in the one language all the experts under- stood: Latin. His correspondents agreed. “[Your book] will have far greater success,” noted his lifelong friend, the Calabrian physician Giambattista Capuc- Printing Natural Knowledge 43 ci, “than it would have had in Venice or Bologna . and it will have a wider and longer itinerary than in our cities.” 7 Indeed, in Italy as elsewhere, non-print forms of communication continued to be the fundamental vehicle of scientific ideas. Letters possessed the ad- vantage of immunity to the authorities that monitored the press, and they were never seized in customs raids along with books and journals. They usually took two to four weeks to cross Europe, as against the several months to a year re- quired for news to appear in the journals. 8 Even though journals could promise wider diffusion, correspondence habits established in the late Renaissance, by which busy virtuosi received and answered as many as a dozen letters a day, guaranteed that information got out when they wanted it to. And those virtuosi who did not want to bother to spread their ideas themselves could expect pro- fessional letter-writers, successors to Marin Mersenne and Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, like the Royal Society secretary, Oldenburg, and the grand ducal librarian in Florence, Antonio Magliabechi, to do it for them. Magliabechi ac- cordingly justified his services to Malpighi by pointing out how “the time you have for writing your very learned works is so precious.” His correspondence, amounting to over 20,000 entries, became the most voluminous of them all. 9 Manuscripts continued to be a legitimate form of publication in Italy and abroad. Borelli’s accounts of the Accademia del Cimento’s solution to the Sat- urn ring controversy, passed around among members of the academy and its correspondents in Rome and The Hague, was considered a sufficient solution to the quarrel raging between Christiaan Huygens and Honoré Fabri. 10 Indeed, manuscripts still had considerable advantages over printed publications. Malpi- ghi could continue to put changes on his extended letter on conglobate glands while handing the manuscript around to friends. As soon as he tried to print it his troubles began. With so many manuscripts of the letter in circulation, his printer managed to get hold of the penultimate—instead of the final—version; so Malpighi was forced to have his latest corrections penned into all the printed copies by hand. 11 Finally, personal encounter as a means of exchanging information continued to be just as important an alternative to print in the late seventeenth century as it had been when Galileo packed his telescope and went to Rome to demonstrate the satellites of Jupiter. Into Italy came the English physician John Ray, the Danish naturalist Nicolas Steno, and the French astronomer Adrien Auzout. Out went Lorenzo Magalotti, ex-secretary of the Accademia del Cimento (to Eng- land) and Bolognese university astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini (to become royal astronomer in France). To make sure sophisticated travelers missed nothing, special guidebooks began to appear, such as Gregorio Leti’s Italia regnante and Jean Huguetan’s Voyage en Italie . “The collection of Count Mascardi [in Verona],” said a typical passage in the latter, “is full of natural rarities, antiquities, and good paintings.” And he provided a list of all the “learned authors and curious and ingenious artisans of Italy” who could be called upon for consultation. 12 At least until the 1670s, Italian natural science investigators mostly put the finishing touches on the communications mechanisms they had inherited from their sixteenth-century predecessors, without trying to modify them too much. 44 Chapter 3 What Galileo had so innovatively put together, namely, the two main publics of experts and amateurs, they solemnly put asunder. Let us examine some of their productions.
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